Witnessing Christmas in Your Eyes

Merry Christmas, Padawan.

This is Christmas number three for you.

The first time you were three months old, and generally speaking I don't think you even noticed.  Sure there were sparkly lights and about a week straight of lots of extra people and yummy smells around, but you hardly had any context whatsoever and you did a lot of sleeping.  It was a joy to have you around for Christmas, but you weren't really experiencing the joy.

Last year you were definitely interested in the stuff around you.  You liked the tree.  You hated going to see Santa Claus (so much so, that this year I made your Mum take her turn to take you for Santa pictures).  You definitely got into the spirit of opening presents - including a few that weren't yours, of course.  But still, I don't really think you had a sense of Christmas.

All that has changed this year though.  You are still pretty unclear as to what Christmas is, but you sure are enjoying it.  You love wrapping presents.  I don't know if you've quite figured out that there is a consequent opening of them - it seems to me that once kids have that figured out, its all you can do to stop them from either exploding with anticipation or just giving in and opening them prematurely.  (I guess that is next year.)  You adore the tree.  Both of them.  You have your own little one up out of reach on your dresser in your room.  You've also enjoyed helping decorate Grandma Van's tree, and Karen and Mollie's tree.  You do a little bit of redecoration of our tree EVERY day.

You love the Christmas Market at Queen Elizabeth Plaza.  Mostly you like the carousel, but I think even if there were no carousel you'd still want to go in every time we pass it.  You and I have been there an average of twice a weeks since it opened.  I think we had our last trip there today - I don't know where we'll find the time in the next four days.

Yesterday it snowed and we went out into it to go and see the old Woodward's window displays set up around town.  There were a lot of Christmas trees too - you loved that.  The weather was pretty unpleasant, truth be told.  It was not a fun show.  It was a cold, wet snow.  Pretty much rain with an attitude.  It looked pretty in the air, but as soon as it touched the ground it was a yucky slush. Yesterday was the day hot chocolate was made for.  (You love hot chocolate.)  But despite the weather you loved it.  You were totally game and even when we had to double back twice to see displays we'd missed the first time, you didn't care.

You love wrapping presents.  You enjoy putting tape on things.  Never where it will be useful, but what's the need for that?  You also like drawing on tags and cards.  Note I didn't say "signing" - though I'm pretty sure that no one who gets a gift from you will have any doubt who they are receiving the present from.

You love "The Ginch" (sic) and also Rudolf - whose last name it seems is "Withyournosesobright," if one is to ask you.  You haven't asked to watch Shrek all month!

You have figured out that when Christmas comes you are going to get a whole day of "Nana, and Papa, and Grandma Van, and Karen and Mollie, and Tara, and K.C., and Mum, and Pop and December," and you are very excited by it.

You look forward to your Jacquie Lawson advent calendar (and your Lindt advent calendar, for that matter) every night.

Oh Padawan.  You have only scratched the surface.  You haven't even had turkey dinner yet or a New Year's Eve party.  And of course, the real discovery of the true spirit of Christmas, the gift of giving GETTING STUFF!

It wasn't really why we called you December, but you appear to be embracing this season with all you've got.  That's a good thing, 'cause inevitably you are going to be associated with it for your entire life.

It Has Been a Strange Week to Be a Parent

Anyone old enough to read this already has a rough picture of what happened this week in Conneticut.  So, as with most posts lately this is not for you, this is for December, my daughter.
I was looking forward to writing tonight.  I was planning to write and tell you about how you, December, are reacting to Christmas.  (It's pretty fun to watch.)  Perhaps I will do it later this week.

Your Mum has been sick this week.  Friday we sent you off to daycare so that she could get a full day of rest.  You are at an age where you are an inevitable handful.  Most of the time that is delightful, but you have no off-switch.  What two-year old does?

For my day I headed out the door early for work, looking forward to a day of news filled with reviews I expected to support my expectations of The Hobbit - beautifully designed, but why the hell is this slim book going to be 9 hours or so of cinema?  And for the most part, that is what the reviews have been... but by lunch I had noticed my first warning.  A single Facebook post that read "Turn it off.  Go outside."  It first I interpreted it as a run-of-the-mill, "don't spend too much time in front of the TV" manifesto.  By the time I began eating, scrolling through my feed, it was clear - something terrible had happened somewhere.  The specifics were then still forming, but the basics were clear - a young man had taken a gun into an elementary school and started shooting... children, adults, he didn't seem to care, but mostly it was children.  Young children.
It turned into a dark day pretty quickly.  I actually avoided anymore news.  I just wasn't ready.  I put out some angry words about the NRA, 'cause it was as close as I could allow myself to get, and forged on through my day.

Before I was a parent, I used to get so angry at the oft heard sentiment "unless you are a parent, you just can't understand."  It is a pretty condescending thought.  "WTF?  Are you saying I can't possibly have the depth it takes to reach that level of compassion or empathy?  Well, fuck you."  Well here I am, a parent.  What I am going to say is this; "Before I was a parent, I didn't have that capacity.  It didn't turn on the moment of birth.  It developed over these past two years - and has noticeably kicked in harder in the past nine months or so.  I'm sure it has more developing to do.  But yes, after I became a parent, everything changed."

When I picked you up from daycare on Friday, I gave you the biggest hug I've ever given you.  It wasn't the longest or the squeeziest, but it came from a place I previously did not know.  A place of immense gratitude that you were coming home with me.  That you would be safe in bed that night.  That you were going to have Christmas.  And, if you'll forgive me for being so willfully maudlin, that I can't imagine how I would manage to carry on if anything were to ever happen to you.

(NOTE from a year later - just for context, this post was written in response to the Sandy Hook shootings.)

730 Days Hath December

Hello Padawan,

I just put you down for your last nap of being one.  The next time you lay down for a mid-afternoon snooze, you will be two.
So now its time for me to fail at being profound in a birthday(ish) address.

A year and one week ago your Mum went back to work and my life changed in a way that was nearly as profound as when you were born.  All of a sudden I became your primary care-giver (though only by a small margin).  I stay home with you three days out of most weeks.  Your Mum takes you on weekends, while Mondays and Fridays you go to day care while I do various wage earning things.  Mostly due to your own demands and requirements your Mum still does more hands on care than I do when we are both home, but you will quit breast feeding relatively soon, and that should make a big difference.

Now, while I have been game for this fatherhood thing from the get-go, I willingly admit that there are things I've been more actively looking forward to than others.  I knew that diaper changing was something I was just going to have to grudgingly live with and that was that.  (But you are potty-training now, so while I have yet to see the light at the end of that tunnel, we can no longer look back and see where we came in.)  I don't relish the thought of having to counsel you through the rough parts of interacting with other kids.  (That has begun.  Just last week you had a run in with a young lady in the building who simply doesn't know how to play nice with other kids.  It made me so fucking angry.  (Please don't speak like that until at least high-school, okay?  And even then, choose your moments based on a combination of respect and effect - we'll discuss the intricacies of that in years to come, a series of conversations I actually am very curious about, if not outright looking forward to.)  Boys... yeah - that may be rough on me, but we shall see.  (Hey, remind me when you are old enough, we should watch Castle - the father daughter relationship there is about as good as a man can dream of, we can both probably gain something from it together.)
I've enjoyed so many of the stages you've already gone through, but in many cases the greatest delight was fleeting and quickly left to memory.  I know you are going to spend the rest of your life being reminded of how you said your name for the first time along Riva dei Sette Martiri in Venice, for example.  But you've recently reached a stage that I've been actively looking forward to from the beginning, and it is a stage that is going to gradually morph into another stage I've been looking forward to.  You've begun voicing your own ideas - somewhat mis-shapen ideas, often due to your grasp of the building blocks of language - but delightful because of that.



The other day we were talking about going camping and when I asked you how long you were going camping for, you declared "two minutes and one time."  A week or two back you were asked who your friends were.  The first time, your answer was "Mummy and Daddy and Karen and Mollie," but when asked again (in hopes of a repeat performance) we were in formed that your friends were "Frogs.... and bunnies."  Often on weekends when I come home from work you tell me about some part of your day.  I rarely pick up more than the obliquest of details, but I can usually identify some major aspect of what happened (more often than not, that you went to a "big park.")  From here you will gradually develop the ability to tell me more and in more precise detail, we'll fly through the glory and embarassment of "the mouths of babes" stage, and before too long we will be having conversations and debates on an equal footing.  I look forward to all of this and more.

We've also reached a stage where when we play I can pick you up and roll around with you without my primary job being to protect you (though there is still a lot of that going on).  You are a much more active participant in our rough-housing and it is always one of my favourite part of my days.  It is still growing, but at the same time I see how it will slip-away.  You get bigger every day, and while I have gotten stonger to accomodate that, the tale of the boy who became the strongest man in the world by lifting a baby bull every day of it's life is a myth.  You get bigger and I get older (and though it rankles me to admit it, I am past my physical prime) and as you become more work to play hard with, my stamina will gradually slip away, and bit by bit without even noticing it happening we will lose those playful delights.  But I swear to you that I will always do everything in my ability to play those games we create for as long as you will have me as your playmate.

Tomorrow we start year three, and though today doesn't look very different at this end, I look forward to looking back in a year and seeing how much your world has grown.

Love your Pop.



P.S. I just checked, and as of this afternoon, "Three Minutes of December" is over half a day of continuous viewing!

The Talking Beast

Once again writing to my daughter December in whatever future she gets around to reading this. Hey Padawan. I of course have no idea how far into the future this message is going to intercept you. I don't know if I am still around, or not. For all I know I'll never get around to leaving you another public message like this, or they will keep on coming for another five or even six decades. All I know is that some day you will probably stumble across these or someone will say "hey, you know your Pop left a bunch of messages for you on his blog from before you were born until... whenever." That person might even be me. When you find them you may let me know you found them, you may not - fair enough, as of now I don't know whether I'm going to point them out to you or not or if I do when. They aren't a secret I'm keeping from you - that would defeat the purpose... and what a silly place to put a secret - out on the internet for public consumption. Chances are this won't be the first or the last one you read, so there will be some value in suggesting that before you read any more that you stop and consider whether there is some satisfaction in rationing the remainder out to yourself. Perhaps you already are, you seem like a clever kid. They aren't going anywhere - they lasted this long for you to find. Save them as something special to be consumed, savoured and cherished like the pieces of an expensive chocolate bar... mind you if you are like your mother that will be a poor metaphor. Remember that you can only have the experience of reading them for the first time once - and they are a finite resource in that virgin form. But that's not what I wanted to tell you about. For context, you are a bot more than 20 months old. We returned from your first trip to Europe (Barcelona, Messina, Dubrovnik, Split, Koper, Venice and London in that order.) a little less than a month ago. You walk, run and climb (just today you went all the way up a slide "the wrong way" on your own - I'll post a video soon and hopefully remember to link it to here) you use an adult fork and know how to open doors yourself, you love birds, buses, frogs and Shrek and the Muppet Show. Your favourite foods right now are bananas, apples, blue berries, asparagus and corn. I take care of you three days a week, your Mom for two and the other two you go to daycare. And you are busting through the language barrier right now. It is pretty cool. Eight weeks ago your vocabulary (not including names of people you know) sat around a dozen and a half to two dozen words that you used singly and only a few of them came out with confidence. Shortly before we left for Europe it started opening up - both in number and construction. One day you and I were out walking - literally training for Europe, getting used to the carrying pack - and I had given you part of a banana over my shoulder. After a few blocks suddenly from behind me came your voice "MORE 'NANA!" It was pretty exciting. You had never strung two words together into one concept before. Of course you got more Banana (On a side note, "'Nana" has inexplicably changed into "'Nani" since then.) Soon thereafter it became apparent that your vocabulary was taking off - all of a sudden you were using a new words every day - sometimes two. In Venice one night an exciting thing happened (well, two - if you count you starting - no, DEMANDING - to go up and down stairs all by yourself). It was late and the three of us - you, your Mum and I - were walking home along the water. Mum and I were asking you questions, as parents do, to see what you will answer. "Who is this?" "Mum!" "Who is this?" "Daddy!" "Who are you?" "'Cem-mar." You whispered. We almost missed it. You said your own name for the first time. A few nights later in London you suddenly started saying it non-stop. (I have video of that too, I'll have to link it.) Oddly since then you don't say it so much. You seem to have decided that your name is "You" ...which makes a certain amount of backward sense linguistically. It will pass, and I will mourn the days when we could point at you and say "Who is this?" and you'd earnestly say "You." By now I haven't got a clue how many words you are picking up in a day. You don't often put more than two together at a time, but they are often grammatically correct in a simple subject-predicate sense. You will open your favourite books and say many key words that appear on that page - you aren't reading, but you associate those words with those pictures. You will spend hours parroting single words that you pull out of the sentences we say. You have full mastery of "more", "no", "yes" (though we hear it less), "Mum", "Daddy", "Shrek", "Show" (Short for Muppet Show), "'Nani" and at least a dozen more. Your less available vocabulary continues to grow too and each day you are demonstrably better at expressing yourself than the day before. It is fascinating, shocking, adorable, delightful, and at the same time a little heart-breaking. I know this is only the beginning of "losing my little girl" but at the same time I am so excited to be meeting the new little girl who is taking her place. She is funny and clever and willful and before too long I expect she'll be able to hold her own in stand-up debate with her old man. I look forward to that day, but it doesn't need to tomorrow.

Toddler Trauma

I inadvertently traumatized my daughter the other day.

She has taken to the Muppets with a vengeance.  I could not be much less pleased by this.  I recall fondly being put in front of the television to watch the first episode when it first aired (what the first episode was is a complex question that I am not going to get into here, but where I lived it was the Rita Moreno episode).

The last episode of that first, most ecclectic, season stands out as one of the biggest oddball episodes of the show (a list which includes episodes featuring the cast of Star Wars, Wally Boag. Chris Langham, Johnny Cash and Steve Martin - each unusual in their own way) due to the guest stars being the mime group Mummenshanz.

December watched the episode as faithfully as any episode and when the final act came on she did something she only did sporadically... she laughed.  Numerous times.



She delighted in the malleable faces, laughing whenever the plasticine was re-manipulated into something new.

But then at the end when the two performers head-butt each other she quit laughing in mid-chuckle... and then when they pulled their faces apart, stretching the plasticine into an amorphous blob between them she burst into tears - of horror.

She spent the next half hour gingerly touching her own face with a look of worry.  Gradually I calmed her down and confinced her that we could touch cheeks and all would be well, but - whew my goodness - I haven't seen her upset in that manner ever.  She has cried harder (indeed she is doing so right now as I write this - her Mom is putting her to bed and she's been a little sick so she's grumpy) but never of the quality that Mummenshanz evoked.

I don't know that if I had recalled where that act was headed that I would have even thought that she might be frightened by it.  I suppose we all need to inch toward an understanding of the grotesque and of fantasy, and inevitably along the way our sensibilities are going to be challenged.  But that doesn't change the fact that I feel a tad guilty about negligently subjecting her to it - even in such a relatively innocent form.

I guess these are just the yolks of parenthood that don't normally get mentioned.

"Pop" Goes the Little Girl

About a year and a half ago Jodie asked me what I wanted to be called by our then gestating daughter.  I hadn’t even considered it.  I had always called my father “Dad.”  It hadn’t even really occurred to me that there were other options.  Of course I knew there were other options.  I just had never even thought that I might diverge from how I was brought up.  In a fit of whimsy I mused that it might be entertaining to use something retro, even bordering on archaic, like “Pop.”  I can’t imagine any circumstance since the days of Dennis the Menace, Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best (and honestly I don’t even know if those are good examples) where I know of that that appellate was used without a sarcastic level of irony.

I largely forgot about it for months – until December arrived – when Jodie started using it at least as much as she used “Dad.”

Yesterday evening just before sitting down to dinner Jodie asked December (as she often does) “who is that?” while pointing at me.  Typically the best responses we get are either a big smile or, if she vocalizes, it’s with the “Bap!” with which she refers to almost everything – though her vocabulary of nonsense words has been expanding around the foundation of “Bap!”  Last night she said, barely above a whisper, “Pop.”  It was tentative but clear, as though she were trying it out for the first time... which presumably she was – though perhaps she’d been practicing when we weren’t around (like that ever happens).  Both Jodie and I heard it – we were both pretty certain.  We both reacted with surprised and encouraging yelp.  Jodie prompted her again, “who is that?”  After a moment, she confidently and unambiguously declared “Pop!”

Oh how the heart melts in moments like this.

Happy Birthday

It is your birthday today. Or rather, your birthday party. You will actually turn one year old on Monday - two days from now. I still have several hours to figure out what to write on your card, but it occurs to me that your card won't survive long the way you go at things these days and it would be nice that if manage to say something awesome that it might have some chance at posterity. ...not that I feel like anything profound is about to spring forth. It has been a very fun year, and one with a continuous cascade of change. Indeed the change began nine months earlier and by one year ago your Mum and I were nothing but ready... which really means we were ready to move forward - we weren't prepared in any way but superficially with a crib and change-pads (and a few other necessities.)
Yeah, I already miss the days when you would curl up on my chest and sleep - that didn't last long. But I wouldn't go back to trade it for the delighted Calvin-esque smile on your face when you are proud of yourself, or excited to see your Mum or I come home - even if we just ran downstairs to the market.  No doubt that small joy will morph into something else before too long.
It has gone so fast, this first year, and yet so much has happened.  It hardly seems possible from either perspective - that it could have gone so fast; or that you could have gone from a fragile ball of sleep to the non-stop walking, jabbering, explorer you have become.
I can't imagine the scope of what the next year will bring.  I only know that with Jodie finished maternity leave that things are now "normal" - whatever that means.  We can't really tell yet as the routine, such as it is, hasn't even finished one full week's rotation.  Even if it had, it will take some time to truly settle into something regular.  I can expect that you will run and climb sooner than we can possibly be ready for it and that by this time next year you will be talking in some manner.  Beyond that, I'll just be relying on the experts to tell me what benchmarks to watch fly past... though it seems usually by the time the experts are telling us to look for them you've already left them behind and are onto the next thing.
I am sure we will have a lot of fun.  That you will meet the world with a sense of wonder and glee which will be matched by my fascination at watching you experience a world of possibilities for the first time.

I love you Padawan.  I look forward to sharing your next trip around the sun with you, and now I have to go figure out what to write on your birthday card.

The Meta Monster

When I look at my own art there is a recurring aspect which crops up over and over again; the element of meta.

What do I mean by "meta"?  Well its art which in some fashion acknowledges that it is art and in effect looks back at itself and comments upon itself or the medium in some way.  Simple, eh?  No.  Not really, but perhaps a few examples might help.

A very good place to start.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is kind of a pre-cursor to meta-narrative.
The Truman Show is vaguely meta.
John Cage's 4:33 is meta-music.
The Purple Rose of Cairo and Sherlock Jr. from which Purple Rose... steals a central premise are both excellent examples.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off with it's fourth wall breaking goes from mild-meta to heavy-meta in the closing credits as Ferris actually shoos the audience out of the theatre.
The movie Adaptation is quite sly meta. As is much of Charlie Kaufmann's work
Are we beginning to get a sense of what I mean?

For some reason this has been an on going theme in much of my art.  The Juanabees' most successful show, Sitcom featured an exposition that engaged the audience first in the form of a diary, then with the admission that the diary was a clunky device, by direct address.  In university I was involved in a collective show that was entirely about meta-theatre.  My friend Matthew and I won the National Sketch Writing Competition with a piece called Le Grande Y-Grec which stretches the bounds of logic with it's performance within a performance structure.  But Matthew and I had much further to go.  In a 48 hour play-writing festival we wrote a piece called variously Moebius Play or Oroborus Play which we feared was so far up our own asses that we were going to be eaten alive by the audience, but ended up being selected as the best of the best a year later at the festival's 10 year anniversary.  Both these works are far too structurally elaborate to effectively distill into a few sentences.  Even Beast of Bottomless Lake features roughly 1/3 the narrative told through the eye of a documentary crew who we actually see filming parts of the movie we are watching - and Beast... is a fairly straight forward narrative.  Suffice to say, meta is part and parcel of who I have been (and may continue to be) as an artist.

Yesterday the buzzer rang.  It was UPS.  We had a delivery from Amazon.  I knew exactly what it was.  We had ordered one of my favourite books from when I was a kid.  The Monster at the End of this Book.

Irecall experiencing  serious delight in having this book read to me.  In fact, I rather suspect that this book may have been amongst those that my parents dreaded.  "Oh no, he wants to read that damned Grover monster book again!"

Fortunately my daughter, December, was in the middle of lunch when the package arrived.  That gave me a chance to sit down and read through it myself and re-accquaint myself with it.

There have been a number of books that have re-appeared in my life because of her that I have been happy to see - Green Eggs and Ham; Where the Wild Things Are; Hand,Hand, Fingers, Thumb; and The Very Hungry Caterpillar all leap to mind.  But none of these were met by me with such a sense of delighted re-discovery.

The plot is simple.  Grover greets everyone on the cover of the book, as you can see in the attatched image.  He finds the copywright information on the first page rather dull and moves on before he realizes what the title of the book informs us... there is a monster at the end of this book!  Lovable, furry old Grover spends the rest of the book imploring the reader to give in to his logic - that if we cease turning pages, we will never reach the end of the book and thus not have to deal with the eponymous monster.  He goes to exceptional lengths to prevent us from turning pages.  He ties them down.  He hammers them together.  He erects brick walls in front of them to prevent the reader from turning the page.  I won't give the fantastic twist ending away, but trust me this is one of those rare books that truly earns its unexpected conclusion.  Well... unexpected if you are three and reading it for the first time.

Poor Grover... not at all happy with you.  You turned another page!

I re-read the book (all twenty pages) to myself, freshly delighting in Grover's over-wrought dismay at every turn of the page.  I also found myself looking at details I recall from childhood - the pages drawn on the pages of the book - an effect I had no name for back then, but now I see as a crucial aspect of the meta-narrative of our journey towards "the monster at the end of this book."

Once I was finished reading, and once December was finished lunching we sat down together and I read the book to her - in Grover's voice.  She's too young to have been amused by anything more than the colourful pictures and her Dad talking in a ridiculously high pitched voice from the back of his throat - a voice which someday she will recognize as being very Yoda-like.  I expect that she'll come to love this book as I have - what's not to enjoy?  Who couldn't be childishly amused by someone over-reacting to you doing the one harmless thing that is is precisely what they are imploring you not to do?  Perhaps it's the contrarian in me.  Or perhaps there will be for her, as there apparently was for me, some inate whimsy in a book which seems to know that it is a book and whose very narrative is tied up in the act of doing exactly the mechanic which what one must undertake in order to read this very book?  I don't know.  What I do know is that regardless of what level she appreciated The Monster at the End of this Book yesterday it absolutely was for her, as I suspect it was for me, her first introduction to 'meta.'  Whether it has a similar effect remains to be seen.

If I Could Protect You from Heredity

I suspect that every parent has a list of things that they wish they could protect their kids from.  Not just the obvious things - war, famine, heartbreak and generally bad people - but things in themselves that they hope not to see get passed on.  These may not necessarily be hereditary, they may be habitual.  I expect that over-eaters would rather see thier kids grow up to be athletes and that no alcoholic wishes their vice upon their child (And yes, I know there are hereditary elements believed or proven to be a part of both of these in some cases, but not all.  It is those "not all" cases of which I refer to here.)  Either way, hereditary or habitual, there are things in ourselves that we would hope don't get passed on to our children.


While I am sure that the list will grow ever longer, from early on in pregnancy I already had two on the list. 


While my teeth are straight and generally healthy, I have soft enamel.  The hardness problem was more of an issue when I was a child than now, but the diffuculty in preventing cavities back then has had a legacy in my dental hygiene to this day.  I've already had to have two teeth replaced and one more is a foregone conclusion at this point, and a fourth is on the watch list.  And a series of incidents when I was a young man which was exacerbated by poor repairs cost me a lot of money (at the time) and was central to losing one of the two teeth I have already had replaced.  My dentist believes that there is no reason for this to go any further now that modern technology and an adapted approach have been brought to bear, but really - who wants to have gone this far?


You got your first tooth last week, that is why this is in my thoughts.


Secondly, I have struggled with many waves of insomnia in my life.  I don't even really know when it began.  Early.  Early enough that I practically took it for granted.  It took me years to realize that I didn't sleep "like normal people."

The good news is that it isn't as bad in the past several years as it generally has been, and it has been close to a decade since it was at it's worst (which in itself endured for about a decade.)  These days bad nights are few and far between and back-to-back nights haven't happened since... I don't know... probably before we shot "Beast..."

I wouldn't wish chronic insomnia on anyone.  Even my worst enemy - they could only be better people with proper sleep. 

It is no fun.  When it is at it's worst, Fight Club makes far too much rational sense.  By the third or fourth day of limited sleep you genuinely begin to feel insane.  Everything exists as though real life is the dream.  You float through the day only half connecting with reality, wishing you could go to sleep through every moment, and then inexplicably as your day's responsibilities come to an end, the fear comes... what if it happens again tonight? I couldn't possibly go through another day in this state. That fear only makes it worse.  As you lay awake, you know that the stress of not sleeping is only making the restlessness worse, but you can't stop it. 

The most hopeless despair I've ever felt in my life has come just before I finally, truly, could not stay awake any longer.  As if that was not enough, I also have a perverse fascination with my problem.  Morbid curiosity for how bad it can get lingers behind every bout. 

I wish I could capture the time lost to lying awake in some sort of productive fashion, but the numbing mind-fuck of three days with an equal number of hours of sleep is inherently limiting for intelectual pursuit.  At best, when I am in the deepest depths of insomnia, my dishes are at their cleanliest.

Last night you were up seemingly all night. I can't help but think that this could be the earliest sign.  I feel helpless and responsible.  There is little I can do to help myself when things get bad.  I can only pass on the few tricks I have up my own sleeve and hope that the years it took me to find them can be truncated for you.

In a better future, this is nothing - and that could very possibly be the case.  Everyone has a sleepless night occassionally.  I have to tell myself that this is what is going on for you, or else I'll find myself awake all night as I wish you saved from this part of your possible genetic inheritance.'

The Shark Game

December and I have organically found our first game.

I call it the shark game, but renaming it after the movie that gave it's inspiration might be worth consideration.

December, someday in your future you are going to read this. It's probably best that you read this before you see Jaws - and trust me, someday I'm going to show you Jaws.  But you should know before you see that movie that you may be betrayed by a pavlovian response while watching it.

Here's how the game works:

I lift December over my head.  I've been doing this almost from the very beginning, but as the months have passed she has come to enjoy it more and I've been able to be a bit less ginger about it.

Once she's been up there, arms and legs flailing like a swimmer... those of you familiar with the fate of Susan Backlinie in the opening of Jaws know where this is going already, don't you?  ...once she is up there enjoying her view of the world, I begin.

"Daaa - dum..."  I say.  She smiles with glee.  She knows where this is leading.
"Daaa - dum..."  I often laugh at this point, 'cause the squirmy-delight of my daughter is completely at odds with the associations I make with John William's most infamous two notes.
"Da-dum da-dum da-dum-da-"  I begin lowering her closer and closer to my mouth... like I am a shark surfacing towards a skinny-dipper.
"dum-da-dum-da-dum-da!"  And then, just as she reaches my mouth I imitate the trumpet blast from the music and kiss her furiously where ever happens to be closest.

And then usually we start again.

So, December, my little Padawan...

You need to know that when you first watch Jaws, that the instinctive feeling of joy and content you feel in your gut is about to turn into a sucker-punch.  Be prepared.  I tell you this because I love you and want to assuage your trauma. 

Remember the good times we had.

Daaaa...dum...

Hey Padawan

Yeah.  "Padawan."

Who could really doubt that I would call you that?

We - your mother and I - were out this past weekend and I noted that I wasn't sure what particular flavour of "geek" was my top-note.  Jodie wasted no time in pointing out that the unique element of my email address is "jedischooldropout."  So should it be any kind of question that I should pick "padawan" as a term of endearment?  Hey... at least I never (seriously) suggested that it should be your actual name.

My Dad called me "my boy" - fairly easy, that one.  He called my sister "princess" - rather common, don't you think?  But they worked for him, and we responded.  That is what is important.  They meant something between us, even if I was to grow up to see them as rather quaint.  I smile in spite of myself when he uses them today.  I am totally prepared for you shaking your head at my choice and thinking "gawd, Dad - that stupid turn of the century mythology of yours is so lame!"

I built your crib and stroller this past weekend.  It didn't make your arrival seem any more real - we passed the zenith of that ages ago when I first saw your "face" on ultra-sound (and so I built my own mythology of our relationship).  What it did do is hammer home the imminent nature of your arrival.  As unlikely as it still is, we are realistically in the range where you could arrive any day.  It is far more likely that you'll show up in at least a few more weeks, maybe even a month... but the chances beyond that point are diminishingly small.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to go be told how that is going to "go down."  Of course they can only be approximate, and even my interpretation of that generalization is likely to be abjectly wrong.  All the effort in the world to not put expectations on what that day is going to be like, how it is going to play out, is futile.  I can't help but imagine, at the very least, the tiniest details.  Little things that Jodie and I have discussed....

"Do you want to cut the umbilical cord?"

"Yeah sure.  I don't put any sort of higher spiritual connection upon it, but how often am I going to get to perform major surgery?"

But who knows what the moment could bring?  Maybe you could follow in your old-man's shoes and demand a c-section... in which case I'm not going to be in the room even if  they would invite me - which they won't.  I'm okay with blood, but the stuff that nature keeps on the other side of the skin-barrier on a daily basis... yeah, I don't need to see that.

The last ten days or so we've spent a fair bit of time squeezing in the last bits of "being social" before "normal life" disappears completely... but I've been thinking today that normal life evaporated ages ago.  What is coming is the new normal.  The normal with you in it.  And by now it is almost inevitable that I am in a holding pattern.  We are just waiting.  Waiting for you to come.

That kind of began two weeks ago.  We spent six weeks doing a lot of running around.  We went to London for Demetri and Fionuala's wedding.  Jodie took a detour to Belfast to visit Lynn and Phil.  After the wedding we went to Amsterdam.  Once we returned to Canada I had mere days before heading to Mississauga for a film festival, and upon returning from there there was little turn around before we went to Kelowna for the World Premiere (yeah yeah - I've dealt with that contradiction elsewhere).  We were there for the better part of a week before coming home, and a by the next weekend we were heading back to the interior, to Logan Lake for Jodie's birthday....

Coming back from Logan Lake was wrought with (erm...) pregnant meaning.  After weeks of running around the world, country and province - each time the circle getting closer and closer to home, it was the unspoken reality that we were heading home to have a baby.

We deflected that with a series of dinners with friends.  Almost as if we were saying "hey, it's been good... we'll see you on the other side."  Tonight I went to what was almost certainly my last Skeptics in the Pub meeting for a few months.

From here out, virtually every appointment is prefaced (at least implicitly) by "we may have to cancel as we might be brand new parents by then and be up to our ears in a learning curve that we could not imagine."

Anyhow, Padawan...

I'm as ready as I'm going to be... which is to say, "not at all, but trying hard."  And what is weirdest of all to me... you have yet to breathe your first breath out here but beyond my comprehension, I already love you.  I don't know for certain that you are a girl.  I've only ever felt you through your mother's skin.  I don't know if you have blue-eyes or brown... but you already have made me smile and you've already made me cry. 

It seems like you already have your job down pat.

See you soon, Little Jedi.